Advent 1 A - November 27, 2022

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Randy Greve, OHC

Advent 1 A - November 27, 2022

Isaiah 2:1-5

Romans 13:11-14

Matthew 24:36-44

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We begin the liturgical year at the end of the age. This is profound, because the narrative of holy scripture is urgent to set before us our end and the world’s end as we have known it.  God’s good creation, marred by sin and evil and groaning for its liberation, is comforted in hope that new creation is our end and home.  The whole Christian revelation falls apart without the promise that the world will ultimately be set right, suffering and death vanquished, and our own selves, resurrected in bodies incorruptible and perfect, will enjoy the direct and unmediated presence of the Lord forever.  

All of the life of discipleship is informed by and moves toward that hope.  Evil and suffering are real, but will not ultimately triumph.  Death and the grave are the next to the last things that happen to us.  The declaration of the nature of Christ’s coming again in glory is not a far away wispy dream, not a threat of violent revenge on the disobedient, but the bedrock of why and how to bother with following Christ at all.  How we live in the present, what we believe about our service and prayer and love for one another is inextricably linked, whether we are conscious of it or not, to what we believe is coming for us and for our world.  We know God is God because God is a God of promise and God keeps promises.  Our hope for the future is grounded in our memory of God’s saving acts.  I am not a Christian in order merely for the afterlife payoff, but I cannot remain a Christian without the promise that the world toward which I work and pray and groan is surely to come. 

That is the liturgical prelude. Now a prelude on this gospel reading: the Jesus of Nazareth whom we read about in the gospels is jarringly present and open.  He keeps showing us and telling us who he is.  He is also a mystery because we cannot fully comprehend his identity.  He acts in surprising, even shocking ways. He does not bend to our ideas of Messiah, or even much care about our ideas.  He is simple, but never easy.  Spend a lifetime pondering and living his words, and you will barely scratch the surface of their meaning.  From beginning to end, he does the Father’s will by modeling and proclaiming God’s love for all. He announces that this kingdom and way of love is alive in God’s covenant faithfulness in a way of being human and in a community that loves neighbor as self. The triumphant justification of us and the world in a new heaven and a new earth is coming, so our vocation is to live now in anticipation of what is to come.

Now to the reading itself.  Our finitude and that of the earth forces the questions of meaning.  The spiritual value of apocalyptic speech is the seriousness of choice, the necessity of awakening to reality - to look, to see.  We wake up especially to those realities we would rather avoid, that make us uncomfortable, that confront us with our duplicity, our double-mindedness.  Christ believes in our power more than we do.  He sees our freedom at times when we would rather escape it.  He is not going to force us onto the ark of salvation, but it is there and we have to make a choice.  Jesus continues to be the great Illuminator still.   To the receptive and willing, the good news is their greatest joy and hope.  To the resistant this same good news stirs confusion, misinterpretation, opposition, and hate.  This language does not condescend to our categories of analysis.  

Part of why beginning Advent with the apocalypse is so powerful is that we enter right away a realm where time gets bent, answers become questions and questions become answers, and our safe and small categories of truth and security are shattered in the light of God’s wild and wide passion for the whole universe.  In Advent we do away with the introductory pleasantries and plunge right into the nature of the paradox of the words themselves:  we are waiting for Christ. Christ is already here.  We long to see the promise of our hope. We already see it.  The hope of Advent is born in the meeting of our desire and God’s desire; we send our waiting from the present into the future.  God sends the kingdom of peace from the future to the present.  We believe they meet and that meeting is called hope.  

The waiting is the surrender.  This kind of waiting is not like waiting for the train.  Advent waiting is the active, open-ended expectation of the real but unknown and unknowable.  For Christ, the human vocation is to enter into this disequilibrium, not avoid it or explain it.  We are most fully human when we know ourselves as creatures and entrust our mortal creatureliness to the one who made us and will remake us anew.  The good news is that the waiting is already the very offering that forms in us the eyes to see and the ears to hear Christ’s coming among us.  

When we lapse into passivity and indifference, may Christ the Prophet break in and steal our apathy and stir in us the cry, “Come, Lord Jesus.”  When we are overly impressed with our own power and believe we know best how to fix the world, may Christ the Savior break in and steal our pride and groan within us, “How long, O Lord?”

I conclude with this beautiful quote from Megan McKenna: “Advent is about judgment and standing in the presence of the thief, the Son of Man, not flinching, looking God straight in the eye, and rejoicing…  The Holy One is coming to visit and is intent on stealing us away from all we are attached to and binding us to one another in peace.” Amen.

Feast of James Huntington - November 25, 2022

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Ephrem Arcement

Feast of James Otis Sargent Huntington - November 25, 2022

Click here for an audio version of this sermon

Thee, mighty Trinity! One God! 

Let every living creature laud;

Whom by the Cross Thou dost deliver, 

O guide and govern now and ever! Amen.

The former Abbot Primate of the Benedictine Confederation, Notker Wolf, had this to say about the call to monastic life:

"At first we feel called by God and attracted by him. We grow in our vocation and get the impression that God has gripped us and will never let us go. We want to withdraw from him in order to escape his grasp. But he loves us too much to allow us to fall. He holds us fast." 

One of the most common and recurring motifs of Sacred Scripture is the call narrative.  We hear God’s call to Abram, Moses, and Joseph; to Samuel, Isaiah, and Jeremiah; to the Virgin Mary, Peter, and Paul.  These and so many more have their lives suddenly interrupted and are overwhelmed by the sense that their lives as they know it is no longer possible because of this divine interruption.  A new path opens up which wasn’t seen before and a voice beckons to follow.  

And this vocation to leave all and follow continues to be heard by some people long after the pages of the Bible have come to an end.  Antony, Benedict, and Romuald hear it.  Francis, Clare, and Dominic hear it.  And even after the vocation to religious life was discredited by the Protestant reformers, God’s voice to leave all and follow was still heard resulting in the Community of the Sisterhood of the Holy Cross, the first women’s Anglican religious order, the Society of St. John the Evangelist, the first men’s Anglican religious order, and James Huntington’s Order of the Holy Cross, the first men’s religious order of the Episcopal Church.  

We’ve just heard the original and paradigmatic call narrative…the call of Abram.  Abram was a wealthy man living a comfortable life.  He had everything going for him.  He wasn’t engrossed in sin, nor was he crying out to God to be saved from an encroaching enemy.  He was simply living his life as was the custom of his day when suddenly God stepped into the routine of his life and revealed a plan for Abram that Abram could never have imagined for himself.  Abram’s good wasn’t good enough for God!  And in that moment, it’s as if Abram becomes so intoxicated with the vision of God that the most daring, the most reckless behavior follows: he leaves country, kindred, and home…all that defined him and all that he knew and loved…with only the voice of God as guide and the promise of God as inspiration.  What results is a whole new way of being in the world that would allow for God to be revealed without the encumbrance of the old ways of Abram’s thinking and being.  Now, Abram wakes up each morning not just with the day’s routines ahead but with a divine purpose and a divine mandate and the blessing of God begins to overflow in all he says and does.  

St. Paul’s equally dramatic interruption accomplishes the same effect:  the old man is stripped off and, impregnated with divine vision of the new creation, Paul boldly follows the call of God with faith alone as guide and reimagines what life in this world can be like lived fully united to God in Christ.  And the world will never be the same because of it.

This same spirit that demands all and summons with urgency to follow possessed Antony which drove him from the comforts of life on the Nile into the solitude of the desert, possessed Benedict which drove him from the mediocrity of life as a Roman student to the meaningful life of seeking God with all his heart, and possessed Francis to strip himself of all worldly possessions and live in stark imitation of the poor Christ.  And this very same spirit also possessed James Huntington to face the ridicule and opposition of a church highly skeptical of religious life to create a community of monks anyway…monks devoted to imitating the crucified Christ who bore the cross for love of the world.  

Like Jeremiah experienced long ago, some people find themselves seduced by God, so overwhelmed by a beauty, so overcome with a purpose that all freedom to choose otherwise seems lost.  Nothing else but obedience and faithfulness to this vision will let one find rest.  “You seduced me, Lord, and I let myself be seduced; you were too strong for me, and you prevailed.”

Each of the God-possessed founders and foundresses of new religious communities, while all daring to follow God to a place they know not and at the cost of immense sacrifice, bore their own unique expression of the Kingdom of God.

In the case of James Huntington and the Order of the Holy Cross, this aspiring member is particularly struck by one quality above all that, at least from my perspective, makes Huntington and the community he founded especially attractive.  Even above his courageous spirit and fortitude is his personal love for Christ and his cross that suffuses his spirituality and the very wise rule he left for the monks in his charge and on which the Holy Cross monks of today continue to stand.  

For Huntington, all the elements of the religious life point to Christ and to the cross which reveals the passion of God’s divine love for the world.  The line O Crux, Ave, Spes Unica (O Cross, our one reliance, hail!) from the hymn Vexilla Regis opens his rule and situates all that is to come.  The life of prayer, which forms the first part of the rule, brings one face to face with the cross…in the liturgy, in obedience, in meditation, in the pondering of Sacred Scripture.  The cross is born in one’s own ascetical life as one appropriates it in the dying to self and in the service to God and one’s brothers in community, which forms the second part of the rule.  And, in the third part, the fiery love encountered in this divine appropriation of the cross manifests the fruit of the cross: a love which must act and a fire which must burn and a Christ in each of us which must bring healing and salvation:  Crux est mundi medicina (The cross is the medicine of the world).  

The life of Father Huntington and the vision for his order of monks is one of total integration into the life of Christ crucified–at once possessed by the love shone forth on the cross in prayer and worship and simultaneously and because of this possessed by the power of the Spirit released from the cross to love without limit.  The dichotomies of the spiritual life fall by the wayside, and all that is left is one consumed with love and fire which must act and burn.

Brothers, we too have heard this call from the cross.  We too have left all behind to journey together with faith alone as our guide, and our hearts burn with this same fiery love.  On this holy day, let us recommit ourselves to stoke this flame in each other through our daily sacrificial acts of kindness and love until each of our hearts burns with the fire that burned in the heart of our founder whose heart burned with the fire that burned in the heart of our Christ.

Christ the King - November 20, 2022

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Aidan Owen, OHC

Proper 29 C - Christ the King - November 20, 2022

Jeremiah 23:1-6
Colossians 1:11-20
Luke 23:33-43

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In the name of the One God, who is Lover, Beloved, and Love Overflowing. Amen. 

Today being a named feast—Christ the King—should make the preacher’s task easy. The three-year lectionary cycle gives us three different images of Christ as King. This year is particularly juicy, if you will, especially given our current political, social, and environmental chaos. 

As I was preparing for this sermon, I kept wanting to tell you about how Christ is not a worldly king. His crown is a crown of thorns. His throne the Cross. In a world in which our leaders set themselves up as demagogues, this is model of kingship we need. I kept wanting to tell you that God’s power is made perfect in weakness, as Paul reminds us. That the kings and potentates and dictators of this world will have their end, that their power goes only so far as the bullet and the bomb, but that God’s power outlasts even the sharpest bullet or the biggest bomb. 

I wanted to tell you all these things. I even believe them. But instead, I heard the Holy Spirit whispering to me, “tell them about Love.” Today is a celebration of the triumph of God’s love. And not at some distant time we call the future, or in some far-off place we call heaven, but right here and right now. 

Julian of Norwich reminds us that all God does for us in Christ is Love and for the sake of Love. Christ’s crown is Love, and Christ’s glory is Love. His death was for Love, and his rising for Love. He sustains us with his Love, and he clothes us with his Love. When the rags of this world fall away from us, only Love remains. 

The feast we celebrate today, the feast of Christ as King, is the celebration of God’s all-powerful love for us and the whole world. It’s also the promise that, after the bullets and the bombs and the heartache, God’s love wins. 

The wisdom of our lectionary reminds us this morning that Christ’s self-giving love is the love of the Cross. Any parent can tell you that deep love is a crucifixion. Because true love reveals our powerlessness. Love takes us to the edge of our being, where we see our own inability to save our beloved, and at that edge, love impels us to pour ourselves out anyway. That’s the love Christ shows for us, pouring out his life for us and offering himself for our healing and redemption. 

We don’t need complex theologies of atonement to understand this movement of love. We only need to move down into our hearts. There we find Christ, enthroned on his Cross, planted in the soil of our hearts. There we learn that love is never about building up or throwing down. It isn’t about conquering or triumphing. Love breaks us down and breaks us open. It softens us, slows us, empties us. And in that emptiness—miracle of miracles—Christ’s love fills us full again with a life we could never have imagined. 

Christ’s way of love is the way of smallness, powerlessness, and failure. And it’s also the way into the kingdom of God. 

Fr. Jermonde Taylor, one of the candidates for bishop in this diocese, said the other night that the major problem facing the Church and Christians today is that we are trying to live whole lives. Instead, God calls us to live fractured lives. Like the host, broken into pieces, we are to live lives broken open to the love of God. And as God stitches us together into the Body of Christ through our participation in the Paschal Mystery, we who were many are made one and whole in Christ. 

The problem with trying to live whole lives is that we shut God out of the process. Wholeness is not ours to make. Salvation is not ours to grant. We cannot create life or flourishing or grace. Actually, quite the opposite. It is our smallness, our frailty, our dying, and our weakness that allow God’s power to move through us to remake and restore us and God’s beloved world. 

The beginning and the end of that work is Love: our love for God, but most particularly God’s love for us. 

Whenever we sing St. Patrick’s Breastplate, I choke up at the line “Christ in hearts of those who love me.” There is some deep truth in those words that shatters me. And if Christ lives in the heart of those who love me, then Christ also lives in my heart, loving the people that fill my life. 

Luke is constantly reminding us that the Kingdom of God is within us. Right here. Our own hearts are Christ’s throne of glory. And, fractured though our lives may be, Christ reigns within us, loving us and the world with a love that reconciles all things. 

It isn’t just that Christ’s love within us outlasts earthly kingdoms. It’s that right here, and right now, that love ties us to eternity and to the fullness of God within us and among us. We are already in Christ’s kingdom, and if we had the eyes to see, we would see this church filled full of saints and angels and all the chorus of heaven, surrounding us, cheering us, loving us. 

To quote Dame Julian again, all will indeed be well, because at deepest level, all is already profoundly well, even here, even now. Christ is already seated on his throne of glory in heaven, on the Cross, and in our own human hearts.

Proper 28 C - November 13, 2022

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Bernard Delcourt, OHC

Proper 28 C - November 13, 2022

Malachi 4:1-2a
2 Thessalonians 3:6-13
Luke 21:5-19

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Be not terrified! Not a hair of your head will perish. 

Our salvation lies in good hands, in God’s hands. 

Imposters will come. War and conflict will rage on (31 countries currently at war in some form or another). Natural disasters will be prevalent. But God’s desire will prevail.

*****

To love God is not just talk. And loving God is not always like walking through a rose garden at dusk.

All three texts today encourage us to keep at our work as Christians, no matter what. In case you need reminding, our work as Christians is summarized in the Great Commission and the Golden Commandment.

The commission is …that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in Jesus’ name to all nations… (Luke 24:47) and the commandment is that …we shall love the Lord our God with all our heart, and with all our soul, and with all our strength, and with all our mind; and our neighbor as ourself… (Luke 10:27)

*****

Apocalyptic literature was a well-known narrative format to the Jewish nation. It kept making a comeback in the Jewish nation’s collective mind whenever they were on the receiving end of international violence in the form of invasion and forced exile. And it made a comeback when it seemed convenient to part with their Jewish identity in order to assuage the difficulties at hand.

Apocalyptic literature is meant to reveal the deeper nature of reality; it tears open the veil that seems to hide God at work in the world; it shows catastrophes and hardships as episodes that we need to endure to enable unity with God.

At the time Luke wrote the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Jewish community (of which the Jesus movement still considered itself an integral part) was reeling from what felt like a world-changing catastrophe. 

The Temple at Jerusalem, the most meaningful center of religious worship, had been destroyed, the city’s population had been massacred after a horrid siege, and the remnant of population had been dispersed in the rest of the Roman Empire.

So it is in keeping with his times that Luke, at the end of the first century of our era, would use the apocalyptic style to emphasize Jesus’ authority.

*****

With today’s gospel passage Luke conveys two important messages to his community.

First important message: Jesus was truly a great prophet. He spoke great truths and some of them came to be realized by the time Luke writes to his people. Two things that Jesus prophesied have by now happened in their living memory or in their present time:

- The Temple has been utterly destroyed,

- The Jesus movement has been, and continues to be, the object of persecutions.

Luke’s gospel a little further than today’s passage assures us that eventually Jesus will return in glory, just as he prophesied. 

So Luke wants us to know that if Jesus was right about the destruction of the Temple and the persecution of his followers, he is also right about his second coming. That is Luke’s first important message to his community. Jesus will come back in glory. You can count on it.

*****

Luke’s second message to his community is to continue its living witness to the message of Jesus Christ, in the meantime.

If earthly powers are doing unjust and unrighteous things, we are not to put the gospel under the bushel. On the contrary, we are to show endurance and fortitude in declaring the gospel. 

We are to persevere in standing for what is right in both word and action. That is how we maintain the integrity of our souls. That is how we live the resurrected life to the fullest.

Should persecutions ensue; so be it. Persecution may actually give us some highly visible opportunities to testify to the gospel.

Suffering as an opportunity for testimony. What kind of testimony does one give in the face of great suffering and great hatred? But Jesus says we need not worry how we will make our case to those who might want to silence us.

Jesus is with us to the end of times and the Spirit itself will speak through us.

Luke is encouraging his community to not be idle while waiting for the Lord’s return. Jesus himself told parables on this theme. Continue to witness with your lives about Jesus, the Way.

*****

The prophet Malachi gives me hope that God will make things good “on the day when God acts”, as he says.

Regardless of how far humanity will have progressed by then and regardless of what calamities will have been endured - On that day, moral ambiguity will disappear and reconciliation will prevail.

Unrighteous success and profit will be unveiled and come to nothing. Then once more you shall see the difference between the righteous and the wicked, between one who serves God and one who does not serve him.

*****

In the meantime, we’ve got work to do. And the author of the second letter to the Thessalonians (probably a disciple of Paul, not Paul himself) gives us further guidance in how to be faithful to God.

Loving God is a work of community and everyone should actively be involved. This work of community gets harder the more people are coasting and running commentary from the sidelines. 

As our writer to the Thessalonians says; “do not be weary in doing what is right” (2 Thess. 3;13).

*****

So what it is that makes these readings relevant today. What makes today’s world an apocalyptic place? What is it that we need to speak out the gospel about?

Is it the overburdening of our planetary weather system? Is it the overconsumption of resources to the profit of the wealthiest and most powerful and at the expense of the rest? 

Is it the use of the justice system to punish rather than to repair, restore and reconcile? Is it the use of industrial and military power to impose worldviews and national agendas on other peoples? 

Is it the pursuit of yet another meaningless pleasure at the expense of deeper connection with our fellow human beings?

For now, the Kingdom of God comes quietly, hidden, unseen. Our very lives are what God gets to use to make God’s Kingdom of Love urgently break into the hardness of the world. 

We are bodies that enable the body of Christ to act in the world. We are part and parcel of the Revelation of God’s Love for creation. God’s Kingdom is also within and among us. It is being revealed also in our contemporary situation. 

*****

“Apocalypse now” is not only a Francis Ford Coppola movie masterpiece; it is one of the themes of the nearing season of Advent. You get a break with the Feast of Christ the King next week, but apocalyptic literature will be back. Let’s get to God’s work of love now.

Proper 27 C - November 6, 2022

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Robert James Magliula, OHC

Proper 27 C - November 6, 2022

Haggai 1:15b-2:9
2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17
Luke 20:27-38

Click here for an audio version of this sermon

    According to the lectionary, today’s texts are only read in late autumn close to the feasts of All Hallows, All Saints, and All Souls which may help us overcome some of our skepticism and unease with what is mysterious and unseen. What the ancients called spirits, angels or demons were actual entities to them that exercised power over their lives. Most parishes transfer the Feast of All Saints to today, which partially explains why in 40 years I’ve never preached on these texts.

    The Epistle’s basic story of good winning out over evil and of God and Satan set in opposition includes a decisive confrontation littered with enigmatic persons and forces. The promise is that evil will be defeated. The Thessalonians lived in a time, not unlike our own, of heightened expectation that the end of the world, at least as they knew it, would be coming soon. They were worked up into an apocalyptic frenzy which was splintering the community. The writer is trying to calm them down, refocus their attention, clarify some misconceptions about the return of Christ, and the way in which they should wait together for that return. Gratitude and encouragement are the antidotes to their fear-based hysteria. He reminds them and us of our common calling to be sons and daughters of God and of our inheritance in the glory of Christ.

 

    Haggai, one of three post-exilic prophets, arose in Judah after Persia became the dominant power in the Near East (539 BCE), and the Jews were permitted to return to their homeland. Amid utter despair this small remnant hears a gracious word of affirmation. The divine call to rebuild the temple is a call to commitment and relationship to God. Haggai addresses their concern by assuring them that God is with them and will provide what the people need for rebuilding the temple. They, however, became preoccupied with rebuilding their own houses and Haggai reminds them that they are not in this as individuals but are called and sustained as a community. The community exists for the sake of its members. Growth in holiness is a journey in community.

    Both lessons remind us that we live in and through one another. We become ourselves only through a process of mutual becoming. It begins in God’s own creative, self-giving love. Our core identity rests in the divine Love that birthed us all. We are all one, all loved corporately by and in God. We are saved not by being privately perfect, but by being part of the whole, part of the Body that is Christ. This echoes the biblical concept of a covenant love granted to the Jewish people, and never just to one individual. 

    This awareness of reality upends so many of our current obsessions about private worthiness, reward and punishment, gender, race, class distinctions, and possessions. The Gospel message is about learning to live and die together in and with God. The good news is that God is saving and redeeming the Whole first and foremost, and we are all caught up in it. We are the blessed beneficiaries, the partly willing participants in the Whole. Mature religion is meant to realign what our egos and survival instincts have put asunder, namely the fundamental wholeness at the heart of everything. The source of our disease and violence is separation from parts of ourselves, from each other, and from God. The early Church understood overcoming divisions as part of its mandate, emphasizing connectedness and oneness in Christ. 

    Throughout history we humans have had a strong appreciation for and connection with our ancestors. The notion of oneness is what Christians were trying to verbalize when they made a late addition to the ancient Apostles’ Creed: “I believe in the communion of saints.” The feast of All Saints entered the Christian tradition in the 4th century with a focus on relation and remembrance, offering us the idea that the dead are at one with the living.

    With this in mind, we turn to Luke’s passage. The Sadducees, the wealthy elite, denied life after death. In this passage they set an intellectual trap for Jesus hoping to show that his teaching about the resurrection of the dead was absurd. Their imaginary scenario about the woman consecutively marrying seven brothers in levirate marriage (Gen. 38:8) is intended to make fun of Jesus. Wealth, power, and prestige insulated them from the pain implied in this tawdry tale of a woman passed from one brother to another.  The question they pose has to do with ownership and marital rights. Jesus takes them seriously and makes the basic point that things don’t work in heaven the way they do on earth. Eternal life is not simply a continuation of this life. Although death is the end of many things, it is not the end of God. 

    When Jesus says: “God is not a God of the dead.” He isn’t saying that God is indifferent toward the dead or that God has forgotten them. God’s love for us is eternal. In compassionate love the dead are drawn into God’s heart. As they were, so now they are in God, healed and whole. In heaven all are children of the resurrection. All who lived before us and are now not among us are living in God. Because of that connection to God, they are not dead to us. They still speak today. We are today together with them because God is not the God of the dead but of the living. This kind of mutual interdependence I have sensed to be true with the death of those closest to me. Anyone acquainted with the poignancy of love that lives on after our loved one dies, will recognize this as we read the story of our lives through the lens of the resurrection.

    When Jesus speaks of the God of the living, he is naming the God of newness, forgiveness, and liberation. He does not answer our many questions about the resurrection or provide a road map of the new creation, though one of our fond illusions is that he should. Jesus teaches us how to walk through this great mystery and to trust that God is on the other side of it. When we consider ourselves to be part of a continuum of life that does not end with death, but transitions to a life after life, our perspective changes. Jesus points us to a God whose faithfulness is immeasurable and inexhaustible. In that faithfulness we find enough to endure all that life and death will ask of us.

    In our day it’s easy to become disillusioned, fearful, and self-absorbed as the Israelite remnant and the Thessalonian Christians did. It’s easy to lose hope. To think of the past as a better time than the present seems to be a common human tendency. The move into the future is not just a repeat of the past and a faint echo of former glory. In God’s future we are moving toward and co-creating a surge of wonder, grace, beauty, and love. Our God is a God who makes a way when there is no way. As Christians we are shaped by more than our experiences; we are shaped by our hopes, by the future and convictions into which we are living and dying. Hope is best lived within a hopeful community, in the company of the saints, living and departed. In such company we find comfort and courage as we face the future together.

+Amen.  

All Saints C - November 1, 2022

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Josép Martinez-Cubero, OHC

All Saints C - November 1, 2022

Daniel 7:1-3,15-18
Ephesians 1:11-23
Luke 6:20-31

Click here for an audio version of this sermon

Br. Josép's altar for the Dia de Los Muertos.

For the past four weeks, since I came back from vacation, I’ve had this nagging longing during my alone prayer time early in the morning in my cell. The longing has been for creating an altar for el Dia de los Muertos to remember the very significant saints in my life who have died. Now, I already have a prayer altar in my cell. As one of them visual and creative types, I’ve always benefited from creating a dramatic space with images and objects that inspire and ground my prayer. (It’s no accident I was in theatre for so many years.) This year I needed to have something tangible to help me celebrate these three wonderful Fall days of which today is the centerpiece. So, I turned my prayer altar into an Altar del Dia de los Muertos.

This longing to celebrate these three days in a tangible way has a bit of a history for me that goes back to my formation as a monk. When I was a novice, I became good friends with Sister Martha, who was then in the novitiate of the Cabrini Sisters down the road from us. She would come to visit from time to time and we would sit down and have long conversations about our vocation and what had brought us to religious life. One day, I asked Sister Martha what she longed for in her vocation. Without hesitating and very confidently, she said: “¡Yo quiero ser santa!” I remember feeling a bit uncomfortable by her response, as if perhaps she was wanting to be “holier than thou” or something. She told me stories of the people in her life whose own lives had influenced her in her decision to become a religious. She referred to these people as “santos”. 

Also during my novitiate, we were given an article to read written by Cynthia Borgeault. She writes about how the Fall offers us a Triduum in All Hallows Eve, All Saints, and All Souls Day. Now, we know about the Triduum, which means “three days”, that forms the heart of the Holy Week celebration- Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and the great Vigil of Easter. The external observances of these days help us to experience a solemn journey deep within our own hearts.

Both Spring and Fall Triduums deal, in different ways, with the Paschal Mystery, that passage from death to life which is at the heart of all mystical paths. They do so, however, with a different emotional and spiritual character and experience. In the Spring the days are lengthening, resurrection energy is moving through the earth as it bursts with new life. In the Fall the movement is inward. The days are shortening, the leaves are dying and falling, and the earth draws into itself. The fall season confronts us with reminders of our own mortality. 

Like the Spring Triduum, the Fall Triduum offers us a journey. It begins with All Hallows Eve. If we look beyond the shallow revelry and excess of the popular holiday Halloween, we can see it as the symbol of facing our shadow self and the tricks our ego will play, if we let it, when it doesn’t get what it wants. Having faced and confronted the shadow self,  we then move to today’s feast of All Saints, the glorious celebration of what we call the Communion of Saints. Communion not only because Holy Communion is usually what we are doing when we remember them, but also because we believe that’s what they’re doing- communing- dissolving in gratitude at that great banquet, where there is no more tears, no more weeping, no more pain, but only rejoicing in the heart of God for eternity.

And the table around which we are about to gather is a foretaste of the heavenly banquet around which the saints are already gathered. It is the table around which we are tied to the whole Communion of Saints, united with all who have ever received bread and wine as the body and blood of Christ. We are joined with angels and archangels, with cherubim and seraphim. We are joined with the church on earth and the church in heaven and all who have called on the name of God. The whole host of heaven crowds the very air we breathe, and all becomes the Kairos of intimacy.

All Saints Day is also one of the days set aside by the Church as especially appropriate for new Baptisms. In other words, a day when new saints, as the church has long referred to them, are made. They are God’s anointed, the exact same words the Gospels use for Jesus, joined with him in baptism they too became God’s children. Anointed by water and the spirit, these world’s newest christs are called to strive for justice and peace among all people, respecting the dignity of every human being. They are called to see the face of God in every stranger’s face, loving neighbor as self. They are called to commit to be the walking, talking good news of God in the flesh by following in the teaching and the prayers and the practice and the fellowship of all those christs who have gone before us. I know it may seem as if I’m being provocative by calling them christs, but Meister Eckart once said that he heard Christ whispering in his ear: “I became human for you. If you do not become God for me, you do me wrong.” We baptized Christians are anointed. This is what Sister Martha was getting at when she spoke about the saints in her life.

So today we remember the saints known and unknown, even as we add to their numbers. Tomorrow we will acknowledge grieve, and celebrate the loved ones we have lost, “from the viewpoint of this world” as Cynthia Bourgeault puts it. I much rather call it Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) than All Souls Day because it reminds me of the finality of death that challenges me to be fully present here now, and so begin eternal life. And I don’t mean eternal life as the perpetuation of time, on and on, which quite frankly seems to me an awful idea, but the overcoming of time by the now that does not pass away. 

Dia de los Muertos rather then All Souls Day seems to me also more in line with the Christian belief of the resurrection of the body, the experience that soul and body are existentially one in the human person. But the body we call our own in this sense is not limited to our skins. As Brother David Steidl-Rast describes it: “It comprises all those elements of the cosmos by which we have expressed our own personal uniqueness; it is the total person. And the resurrection of life, as St. Paul sees it, is a new creation of the total person, soul and body, by God who alone provides the continuity between the old and the new life.”

On my Altar del Día de los Muertos are some of those saints who gave and lost themselves to the Christ-self within them, to universal interrelatedness in love. They practiced what Ghandi called the “Evangelism of the Rose”. They were so beautifully who God made them to be, their fragrance led others to want to hang around them. They were the saints in my life who embodied the faith so clearly, I not only wanted it for myself, but also wanted to create my own job description for those who come after me. A hundred years from now, God willing, someone will remember us for handing on what was handed to us. May we all engage the rite of passage of these three holy days and till the inner soil of our hearts for the mystery of the Incarnation that lies ahead. 

¡Que así sea en el nombre del Padre, del Hijo y del Espíritu Santo!

Amen+